Australia's woes with its farm animals raised for their meat appears to be unending. After 21,000 Australian sheep were culled in October in Pakistan over suspicions of bacterial contamination, another 50,000 chickens in New South Wales were quarantined this week by state authorities.

The hens were quarantined because of suspicion that an unidentified strain of bird flu hit a chicken farm in Hunter Valley. However, the suspected virus appears not to be of the same strain as the H5N1 which killed 359 people worldwide in different avian flu outbreaks since 2003.

The NSW Department of Primary Industries said on Friday that it will cull the 50,000 chickens after lab tests on the virus samples conducted by the Animal Health Laboratory of the CSIRO in Geelong confirmed it is the H7 strain.